Paul Tillich
Faith is an act of a finite being who is grasped by, and turned to, the infinite.Collection: Faith
I hope for the day when everyone can speak again of God without embarrassment.Collection: Hope
Doubt is not the opposite of faith; it is one element of faith.Collection: Faith
The first duty of love is to listen.Collection: Love
Man's ultimate concern must be expressed symbolically, because symbolic language alone is able to express the ultimate.Collection: Alone
Our language has wisely sensed the two sides of being alone. It has created the word loneliness to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word solitude to express the glory of being alone.Collection: Alone
The courage to be is rooted in the God who appears when God has disappeared in the anxiety of doubt.Collection: Courage
Language... has created the word 'loneliness' to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word 'solitude' to express the glory of being alone.Collection: Alone
He who risks and fails can be forgiven. He who never risks and never fails is a failure in his whole being.Collection: Failure
Being religious means asking passionately the question of the meaning of our existence and being willing to receive answers, even if the answers hurt.Collection: Religion
The courage to be is the courage to accept oneself, in spite of being unacceptable.Collection: Courage
Loneliness expresses the pain of being alone and solitude expresses the glory of being alone.Collection: Alone
Religion is the state of being grasped by an ultimate concern, a concern which qualifies all other concerns as preliminary and which itself contains the answer to the question of a meaning of our life.Collection: Religion
Faith is the state of being ultimately concerned.Collection: Faith
Decision is a risk rooted in the courage of being free.Collection: Courage
Man is asked to make of himself what he is supposed to become to fulfill his destiny.
There is no love which does not become help.
Boredom is rage spread thin.
The awareness of the ambiguity of one's highest achievements (as well as one's deepest failures) is a definite symptom of maturity.
We can speak without voice to the trees and the clouds and the waves of the sea. Without words they respond through the rustling of leaves and the moving of clouds and the murmuring of the sea.
Neurosis is the way of avoiding non-being by avoiding being.
Faith consists in being vitally concerned with that ultimate reality to which I give the symbolical name of God. Whoever reflects earnestly on the meaning of life is on the verge of an act of faith.
Astonishment is the root of philosophy.
Cruelty towards others is always also cruelty towards ourselves.
If my tongue were trained to measures, I would sing a stirring song.
One cannot be strong without love. For love is not an irrelevant emotion; it is the blood of life.Collection: Strong
God does not exist. He is being-itself beyond essence and existence. Therefore to argue that God exists is to deny him.Collection: Inspirational
The fatal pedagogical error is to throw answers like stones at the heads of those who have not yet asked the questions.Collection: Errors
You are accepted. You are accepted, accepted by that which is greater than you, and the name of which you do not know. Do not ask for the name now; perhaps you will find it later. Do not try to do anything now; perhaps later you will do much. Do not seek for anything; do not perform anything; do not intend anything. Simply accept the fact that you are accepted!Collection: Names
We have to build a better man before we can build a better society.Collection: Men
In this respect fundamentalism has demonic traits. It destroys the humble honesty of the search for truth, it splits the conscience of its thoughtful adherents, and it makes them fanatical because they are forced to suppress elements of truth of which they are dimly awareCollection: Honesty
Grace strikes us when we are in great pain ....Sometimes at that moment a wave of light breaks into our darkness, and it is as though a voice were saying, 'You are accepted.'Collection: Pain
The name of this infinite and inexhaustible depth and ground of all being is God.Collection: Names
Love that cares, listens.Collection: Love
In those who rest on their unshakable faith, pharisaism and fanaticism are the unmistakable symptoms of doubt which has been repressed. Doubt is not overcome by repression but by courage. Courage does not deny that there is doubt, but it takes the doubt into itself as an expression of its own finitude and affirms the content of an ultimate concern. Courage does not need the safety of an unquestionable conviction. It includes the risk without which no creative life is possible.Collection: Expression
Loneliness can be conquered only by those who can bear solitude.Collection: Loneliness
Genuine forgiveness is participation, reunion overcoming the powers of estrangement. . . We cannot love unless we have accepted forgiveness, and the deeper our experience of forgiveness is, the greater is our love.Collection: Forgiveness
Sometimes I think it is my mission to bring faith to the faithless, and doubt to the faithful.Collection: Thinking
Fear is the absence of faith.Collection: Absence
Doubt is the necessary tool of knowledge.Collection: Doubt
Every institution is inherently demonic.Collection: Institutions
There is no condition for forgiveness.Collection: Conditions
The abundance of a grateful heart gives honor to God even if it does not turn to Him in words. An unbeliever who is filled with thanks for his very being has ceased to be an unbeliever.Collection: Gratitude
Forgiving presupposes remembering. And it creates a forgetting not in the natural way we forget yesterday's weather, but in the way of the great "in spite of" that says: I forget although I remember. Without this kind of forgetting no human relationship can endure healthily. I don't refer to a solemn act of asking for and offering forgiveness. Such rituals as sometimes occur between parents and children, or friends, or man and wife, are often acts of moral arrogance on the one part and enforced humiliation on the other. But I speak of the lasting willingness to accept him who has hurt us.Collection: Forgiveness
All things and all people, so to speak, call on us with small or loud voices. They want us to listen. They want us to understand their intrinsic claims, their justice of being. But we can give it to them only through the love that listens.Collection: Love
Spirit is the presence of what concerns us ultimately, the ground of our being and meaning.Collection: Motivation
Accept the fact that you are accepted, despite the fact that you are unacceptable.Collection: Facts
Where there is faith there is an awareness of holiness.Collection: Holiness
The passion for truth is silenced by answers which have the weight of undisputed authority.Collection: Truth
The character of human life, like the character of the human condition, like the character of all life, is "ambiguity": the inseparable mixture of good and evil, the true and false, the creative and destructive forces-both individual and social.Collection: Character